No place for ink-jetted photographs

VISUAL ART: Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award. Fremantle Arts Centre. Until November 21.

Lily Karadada's etching and aquatint Wandjina and Bush Turkeys.

VISUAL ART: Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award. Fremantle Arts Centre. Until November 21.

AMONG the various works in the Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award exhibition is Michael Kempson's The Last Stand. The title is apt, for this work executed in etching and aquatint is one of the few real prints in a show assembled with no apparent concern for aesthetic integrity and dominated by photographic imagery.

The winning entry gives an idea of the kind of thing the judges consider a contemporary print. Rebecca Beardmore's Seeing Between II is a blurry pastel photograph of a girl produced by an ink-jet printer (this is called, more politely, an archival pigment print). An image is not made more interesting by making it indistinct, but the judges considered this "a quietly commanding work".

The second prize was won Benjamin Forster's Discourse, a pair of automatic printers pouring out long ribbons of text, one composed of words by Karl Marx, the other by Adam Smith, the father of modern economics. It is a clever idea in a rather art-school way, although the text selections seemed rather too random. It is the sort of thing that would suit the context of a biennale. But a print show?

Does anything made by a printing machine qualify as a print? The judges declare that both of these works "inform a rich interrogation of printmaking and its processes", which demonstrates once again how the collapse of grammar precedes the breakdown of clear reasoning. In fact, these works show explicit contempt for printmaking and its processes.

There are countless other cases. Darren Bryant's Train wreck is once again an ink-jet print of an old colour photograph showing a suburban family playing with a train set, while the shapes of bombs are blind-embossed into the paper above them. Deriding the unthinking lives of others is never an attractive stance for an artist, and the work could hardly be conceptually thinner.

Rebecca Mayo's Clarice 1890-1957, a portrait of a young woman sitting on a modernist chair between the wars - she is presumably a forebear of the artist - is much more evocative, but is still essentially a digital print of a photograph. Valerie Sparks's This Weather is a panoramic black-and-white photograph of the sea; an arresting piece, but once again an ink-jet print.

These last two works are interesting and attractive in themselves, but belong in a photography exhibition. In fact, we may wonder how they came to be in this show at all. Why did the artists think it suitable to enter them? Why were they accepted and hung? Why were they acquired for the sponsors' art collection?

That all such questions could be passed over in silence reveals, of course, the hegemony of photographic reproduction over the whole field of contemporary image making. Consider what would happen if an artist entered an etching or wood-engraving in a photographic show; he would be politely reminded that his work was not a photograph and did not qualify.

Photography, in other words, is taken for granted as a default form of image making. It is simply part of the pervasive environment. Printmaking techniques, in contrast, are distinct and unmistakable. An etching or a dry point is categorically not a photograph, as readers can see in an impressive show at the Art Gallery of South Australia, A Beautiful Line.

The fascination of prints lies in the way that nothing is given and everything has to be made. There is precisely none of the amorphous facility of photography. The artist cannot take a picture but must seek abstract graphic equivalents for everything he wants to represent, and this is why printmaking is inherently so interesting.

To recall the distinct qualities of an art form, however, is to run counter to the single deepest rut in contemporary thinking about art, an ideology that has achieved the status of an axiom: that rules and conventions and categories are limiting, and that creativity is favoured by escaping from them.

Hence the two most excruciating cliches of contemporary discourse about art: challenging conventions and pushing boundaries. I encounter these in press releases and catalogue essays every week and they are always the symptoms of a mind switched to automatic.

In reality, creativity - like language - is impossible without rules, conventions and boundaries. Real artists play with them, while the obtuse think they should be abolished. Printmaking has many techniques, many boundaries and as many possibilities; a printmaking exhibition should bristle with material and aesthetic differences, not subside into post-photographic complacency.